The art of posting comments on Facebook, and why I don’t go to church.

Probably 30-40% of the comments I type on Facebook are vetoed. That means, when I type a response to somebody’s status, I spend some time thinking about posting it, then eventually decide to ditch it. There are times where the world might be worse off from a Facebook comment, due to subtle attacks on one’s egotistical persuasion, or very bad response-jokes. The times I like to avoid hitting the comment button is:

• When I realize that the comment I’ve typed is absolutely generic and unoriginal, and somebody else is guaranteed to type it anyway.
• If it is a reference to an inside joke or previously shared emotions; “it was nice seeing you,” or “I love you snookums,”  or “thanks for cake,” etc.
• When there’s an evident desperation to be “witty” or “funny”
• If the “witty-ness” or “funny-ness” just turns into something too bizarre.
• When my response is a deliberate knife-swipe towards one’s lifeline to comfort.

These above are the unspoken rules I’ve dug from my psyche for the sake of this blog post. Many times I’ve misjudged my responses when held up to these personal rules for posting. And it’s a real bummer when you see 50 other people post the same thing you did.

“You are not a unique snowflake.” -Bradley Pitt, as Tyler Durden

So there’s a fear of unoriginality… but then of course, you can’t be too unique. And if you’re too unique, people don’t really want to have anything to do with you.

The solution to being truly unique? Don’t be a human. We need other humans to feel good about ourselves, and others won’t like you if you carry some crazy, twisty, chaotic energy amongst yourself.

But what about the enlightened ones who are ever so complete and whole? They don’t need the affections and approval of others?

Answer: They still need other people to climb up the hills to give offerings of flowers and oranges and everything.

(This was not the direction I planned for this entry).

Anyway, if you clicked on the photograph above, you may see that I have a tendency to get irritated by “Praise God” posts on Facebook. Perhaps that’s because I see from the perspective that a public forum is being used to seek the approval of a divine personality.

That sort of thing bothered me even when I went to church. It’s equivalent to making a scene by raising your hands up during the singing.

And it’s only because I’ve been there that I can see when joyful praises contain the seed of fear. The sad thing is that the modern church molds people into a belief system that is fear-based.  There’s so much joy, love, happiness, and various positivity in the preaching, which is a necessity for some people’s very sanity, but there is a haunting fear of a jealous, egotistical, wrathful personality who can take all of that away at any moment. Whether you’re forgiven or well-behaved, it doesn’t matter. To the serious modern church-goer, that fear is unavoidable. It’s important to one’s psychological well-being to be able to feel and think certain things without feeling like their lines are tapped.

I’ve been thinking about this lately. Also about the teaching of “God is love”. Well, if that is the case, keep in mind that the emotional and mental state of love or bliss can be measured energetically. So can fear. Fear is a lower vibrating energy versus the higher vibrating love. Our bodies are emotional mountains of walking, talking energy. As long as there is a deeply embedded fear that is not made conscious, it is absolutely impossible to fully experience the vibration of love. The interesting thing is, the way the church is structured, it fashions people’s beliefs in a way that actually cuts people off from fully experiencing real, true love (or “God”) in their ideology.

There are plenty of list-able reasons that frustrates me about modern church/religion, such as the listen-to-middle-aged-American-SUV-family-man-tell-me-how-to-live-my-life reason, but this is a big reason why I don’t go to church.

And if I seem a little polarized about it all, that will change when I smooth out all the knots in my body that I’ve accumulated during the first 23 years of my life by trying to fit in.